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If you'd like to actually quickly preview images in the terminal, you might be interested in my tiv app: https://github.com/stefanhaustein/TerminalImageViewer

(it uses a block graphics character matching algorithm to get a slightly better resolution than 2 pixel per character)

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Ah... the things that others don't see. Lenna - the classic image, the distinctive Ubuntu of the terminal window, as per the original article.

I have not worked it out yet but it must be possible to use this type of thing - ASCII art - for those images that you can download inline with a web page to show before the main images download. As per the BBC that always include an inline image with a news story download so you have something to look at on a 3G connection whilst the rest downloads.

For the web image preview use case, it would probably be quite hard to beat data urls: color encoding would be quite verbose, and getting consistent character availability and widths will be tricky, too...

Nice!! Installing

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